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Author: Livia N

Swap one for the other

The original Battlestar Galactica, you know – the one with Lorne Greene, is so much better than the new one.

Driving on highways during the daytime is always worse than driving at night. Driving at dusk, dawn, and 3am joyous.

Dairy products are interchangeable.

The key to running an economic kitchen is just the right amount of storage space – too much, and those exotic sauces and fancy jams start looking sexy; too little, and you can’t stock up on sales. It’s the freedom to be able to buy the six boxes of pasta for $3 that saves you from running out of pasta and getting stuck with a box for $2.50. It’s knowing that you have enough meat in your freezer that you can wait for good sales and never pay more than $2/lb for any kind of meat (and can stubbornly wait for some to get even cheaper – like chicken thighs below $.50/lb, whole chicken and pork shoulders or picnic ham roasts for $.80 – and if you live somewhere these are cheaper, that alone will be enough for me to spend at least 5 good minutes considering moving there). Produce is pure luck, though – luckily, I have people selling lots of good produce cheaply off the back of a truck.

Sewing your own clothes from scratch doesn’t save a dime.

People think I can garden even though most of the pots on my porch are empty. The pots are empty because I have been systematically killing the plants that were passed to me when my neighbor moved out of state. They think I can garden because I have pots.

Applesauce

I have a huge jar of applesauce.

Seriously, you could feed a nursery for two weeks on this jar of applesauce.

No, I wasn’t stupid enough to buy it – my mother did. See, my father will only eat pork two ways – roasted in a pita with lots of condiments and roasted with applesauce on the side. Therefore, applesauce.

Now I had a few jars of tiny applesauce running around, and when I saw that my mother had a HUGE jar and only call to use a small amount of applesauce three times a year, we swapped.

I figured that I am brilliant and creative and always willing to try new food things.

But I can not come up with a single thing to do with a giant jar of applesauce besides starting in with a big spoon.

So it has languished unopened in my refrigerator.

But this is getting ridiculous.

So either I need a LOT of applesauce recipes (and none of that baking stuff, because they always seem to use applesauce as the magic low fat ingredient, and I don’t trust that logic), or I need someone with an applesauce fetish to take it away and have a delightful weekend. Probably the former.

ETA: Suggestions in the comments to this post included: baking; muffins; boil a cup or two of the stuff til it’s syrupy and pour it, still hot, over ice cream; a good addition to newfangled baked bean type things; buy some potatoes and onions and make a lot of latkes; pumpkin bread; curried chicken and apple stew, with a jar of applesauce in that as part of the gravy; pork roasts in a crockpot and instead of adding juice/wine/water added a jar of applesauce and some sauerkraut.

I have a muffin recipe that uses applesauce, but not as the magic low-fat moisture enhancer, oh no! My recipe uses applesauce as a tart substitute for buttermilk, to make the baking soda go BOOM and create fluffiness

I have an awesome set of friends.

Not food – politics, sorry

My views of politics are naive and simple, and I do my very best to keep them that way.

1) I do not trust the popular media. I know how easy it is to manipulate film and images. I know how hard it is to write a story that just relates facts… and that even then our opinions bleed through in which facts are more relevant. I have listened to the news on the radio change at 5am into a completely different story.

2) I understand that I am hypocritical. No matter how much I try for internal consistency, I can not stretch the logic all the way around. *shrug* So I just go for what feels right – and am willing to change some of my opinions with enough persuading… not most of them, though.

So what do I think that is all controversial? I think that all people are human beings.

  • I think that people in any country are human beings.
  • I think that poor and underprivileged people are human beings.
  • I think people of all sexual persuasions, identities, and proclivities are human beings – and that it’s probably none of my business.
  • I think that people in wheel chairs are human beings – and the guy who sometimes rides my bus who looks like he just stepped out of the makeup trailer on a horror movie; yep, he’s a human being, too.
  • I think that terrorists are human beings. And that the word terrorist does not define a country of origin or a religious belief.
  • I think that paedophiles are human beings.
  • I think that the perpetrators of domestic violence (of any gender) are human beings.
  • I think that the Tupperware lady or man is a human being.
  • I think old people are human beings.
  • I think that people of any race, ethnicity, and heritage are human beings.
  • I think even that religious extremists and republicans are human beings.
  • I think you are a human being

And I think all human beings deserve equal rights.

Equal rights, equal responsibilities, and equal protection under law.

Now that doesn’t mean I have to actually like human beings, but that’s a different post entirely

Here is the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: United Nations, 1948. (Thank you, brown_betty.)

Here is a clever post worth reading.

This *is* my pious face

So I snuck out for lunch and ate at a restaurant so that I wouldn’t have to discuss whether I was or wasn’t eating with the other people in the staff lounge. While I was there, not only did I write a bunch more, but I also had three cups of tea.

Now I really want more tea – but people will see me.

Yes, it is very silly and I am kind of enjoying that aspect.

As for heartwarming traditions – My family was never very good at the whole fasting thing, so every year for Yom Kippur we would remove ourselves from the temptation. We’d all pile into the family car and go for a long drive north (and sometimes west toward the mountains) so that we could catch the best of the autumn foliage. We’d go by back roads, and occasionally we’d accidentally end up in another state, and then we’d turn around and head home in time to stop (almost always a little early before dark) at whatever restaurant looked new and interesting.